The internet used to be a library. You could visit where and when you want, browsing information relatively undisturbed.

Now; every corner of the internet is trying to sell you something, with many of them stealing your information in an attempt to leverage it against you to coerce or even force you to pay up.

I miss when an adblocker was a foreign concept, because it used to be a solution in search of a problem. Now ads are so invasive and overwhelming that browsing without blocking them is unbearable - if you can even browse without having to signup and subscribe to yet another ‘service’.

gemini protocol exist. but in some ways it currently misses the mark for old-school internet. currently, its lacking in some areas.

If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine.

That wasn’t the old internet. That was web 2.0. The old internet was before corporate social media.

Before reddit/Facebook/MySpace there were personal websites through geocities. Then came ytmnd.

At a certain point there were still videos, but it was QuickTime and realplayer and “buffering” was an annoyance.

Flash player came out and allowed for a renaissance of creative games and movies.

We had all the building blocks for creative expression, with none of the garbage that started growing with digg/reddit.

This might be a controversial take, but I don’t think the 90’s internet or even the web 2.0 era was better than the modern web, just different.

The 90’s internet was so inundated with pop up ads it was unusable without an ad blocker to the point browsers themselves started integrating popup blocking. Finding quality content also was very difficult. You’d have to spend hours running through Lycos, Ask Jeeves, 86.com, and a half dozen other search engines and sift through hundreds of results just to find what you were looking for. Chat rooms were neat and nice for social interaction but you’d be just as likely to encounter some creep or dick bag as someone interesting to chat with and making friends online was just as hard then as it is now. Towards the end of the period we saw the democratizing of the web with the introduction of blogs which drove the final nail through the heart of the personal web.

The Web 2.0 era brought corporate social media. MySpace, LiveJournal, Digg, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, and many others, built on what blogging platforms had done before, created walled gardens where content was trapped. By this point most people had stopped hosting or maintaining their own websites that were accessible via search and links and now all user generated content was behind a password protected wall that required login to view. At the same time search became tainting by monetization. Before when you searched you would be returned the results that were the most relevant, now search results returned the most profitable links. SEO, which was initially developed to promote blogs was weaponized to fill search results with nothing but links to buy.

The modern era of the web is so different than it was back then. There is a wholly different type of person that uses it, digital natives. Young millennials, gen z, and gen alpha all had the internet from early childhood and how they use it is almost alien to older generations. The kids seem to be okay with the status quo and have options like the fediverse that didn’t exist in previous internet eras if they’re not.

If you’re willing for forgo using most of the commercial web you can have the best of both worlds. The weird pioneer vibes of the 90’s internet, the enthusiasm of the web 2.0 era, and the speed and conveniences of the modern web. You’ve just got to spend a week or two setting everything up.

Back in the day, people went to the internet to interact with other people.

At this point, almost all sites have been set up to get money out of people.

These are some more general thoughts on the subject:

I’m going to take issue with any statement that puts Facebook. And “just fine” in the same sentence. A terrible company run by largely terrible people.

The good old days of fan forums and communities that grew around shared interests in the dial-up age had a vital advantage: small user numbers and low cost. Mostly text based packets were cheap to send and receive. At very low speeds. It was inevitable that standards would rise, and with it, costs. And if money becomes a factor, whoever has or makes it rules. An inevitable and irreversible development if you ask me.

And if it’s the niche community nostalgia that hits you, you can still have that. It’s probably on a small fediverse server you’ll also need to support financially or on a Discord server. The internet people loved largely survived if you knew where to look and all the other stuff just grew around it. And only occasionally over it. No service is eternal. There will be a time when Insta will be a faint memory. Or reddit. Or Wikipedia.

The early internet also had a terrible impact on what it became much later. People put their content out for free/as supported, especially media offerings and the news, and instilled in consumers the expectation that one shouldn’t have to pay for shit online. This was the first domino falling in local newspaper death and an increased disillusionment with politics.

Another problem of the early internet is that it was built by mostly idealists who created the perception that connecting the world would democratise knowledge and participation and it would be a force for good. This hype carried us through its expansion and people saw the negative sides far too late if you ask me. The threat of surveillance was waved mostly away. That hype is not so dissimilar to what we are seeing with so-called AI these days.

Organised social media created a bias that the loudest voices there were a majority. The flood of bots may actually finally cure us of that perception. I call it organised because the early chat rooms around Star Wars or X-Files or something like that were a form of social media before we had a name for it.

You haven’t missed anything from the early internet. Unless you want people fighting over landline phone connections and waiting hours for a solitary picture of some boobs to download. The internet isn’t good or bad, it’s a tool and people use it for good or evil. Always have (remember the anarchist cookbook?), always will do.

I miss visiting 3dfiles.com where every day there would be the latest shareware games, tech demos, graphics drivers and screensavers available to download. No bloated reviews or sponsored content, just actual cool software that would put your computer’s hardware to use in a fun way.

It’s not used as a way to maximize profit i.e., the most income out of the least spending.

For example, a reasonable amount of ads were tolerated to keep the website running. Now, you have streaming services who want you to spend to watch a show for ads. Not only they get the price of admission from you, but they also get paid by ad providers for the same viewers to look at product placements.

If I try to be more concise, it’s the extent of an ordinary user able to be an autonomous actor, able to make their own decisions, while they are in the internet.

I remember typing in any term you were searching for, adding your countrys TLD or whatever TLD seemed fitting and getting results, sometimes the results you were looking for. Search engines came up later and basically were the shit.

Nowadays they are shit.

Myspace and geocities is what I’d consider old internet. The point was that I created the site, I owned the site, I customized the site.

I had a buddy who had a geocities that was all just baseball statistics and facts about his favorite baseball player.

The amount of fun and time and love that went into a website was obvious and personal. Yes they were annoying, but not as annoying as ads are nowadays. They were funny annoying, like walking into a friend’s room with posters and music of people and bands you hated, but knew they loved.

Now, everything is a sterile looking, curated, rage baiting, ad pushing, addicting, political, propoganda money grab.

Neopets, maybe it was a being a child though